The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [116]
That support hadn’t come from Earth or anywhere else in the solar system, but from smart probes sent out as explorers centuries after the Ark’s departure: very smart probes, which had probably forged a notion of AI destiny that was somewhat different from the notions formed — and almost certainly argued over — by their homestar-bound kin.
On Ararat, or Tyre, Mortimer Gray hypothesized, a second “first contact” must eventually have been made: the first honest and explicit contact between human beings and extremely intelligent, self-conscious machines. Now, the fruits of that contact had come home…but not, alas, to an uproarious welcome. Some, at least, of the ultrasmart machines based in the home system were not yet ready to come out of the closet. At the very least, they wanted to set conditions for the circumstances and timing of their outing — conditions upon which it would be extremely difficult for all of them to agree.
What a can of worms! I thought. What a wonderful world to wake into! But that was definitely the effect of the anaesthetic. I’d been out of IT long enough to start suffering some serious withdrawal symptoms, and to have the bots back — if only for a little while — was a kind of bliss.
If my seven companions had had decent IT, we’d all have been able to keep thrashing the matter out for hours on end, but unsupported flesh becomes exhausted at its own pace and they were all in need of sleep.
Lowenthal left it to Adam Zimmerman to plead for an intermission, but he seemed grateful for the opportunity. Now the crucial breakthrough had been made, he needed time to think as well as rest. As he got up, though, I saw him glance uneasily in the direction of one of the inactive wallscreens. He hadn’t forgotten that every word we’d spoken had been overheard.
If we were wrong, our captors would be splitting their sides laughing at our foolishness — but if we were right…
If we were right, Alice had given us one clue too many. She hadn’t blown the big secret herself, but she had given us enough to let us work it out for ourselves. “They” might not take too kindly to that — but it was too late to backtrack. The only way they could keep their secret from the rest of humankind was to make sure that none of us had any further contact with anyone in the home system.
That thought must have crept into the forefront of more than one mind as we all went meekly to our cells, and to our beds.
I knew that I needed sleep too, although I was now in better condition than my companions. I figured it would be easy enough to get some, now that I had nanotech assistance — but the bots Alice had injected were specialists, working alone rather than as part of a balanced community. Although I was only days away from the early twenty-third century, subjectively speaking, the late twenty-second seemed a lot further behind. I’d quite forgotten that paradoxical state of human being in which the mind refuses to let go even though the body is desperate for rest. When I lay down on my makeshift bunk, too tired to care about its insulting crudeness, I couldn’t find refuge in unconsciousness even when the lights obligingly went out. Nor, it seemed, could Christine.
“Why would they bother?” she wondered aloud, when the silence had dragged on to the point of unbearability. “If they’re machines, they can’t care what humans think. They’re emotionless.